Green Car Technologies Explained

Let’s say you are a big-shot. You need to get around. And public transport is just not going to cut it.

You do a lot of miles and want to go the extra mile to minimise your impact – what should you do?

The answer any good car salesman would give you is: get a Prius (in case you missed it, this is Toyota’s flagship ‘hybrid’ high efficiency offering).

Sounds good, but what is a a hybrid? Is that electric? Do I need to plug it in at night? And what are the alternatives? Are there any?

In this section, I hope explain this and some of the other things coming down the turnpike.

Electric, Hydrogen and Hybrid Cars

Time to plug in?

Electric cars are not new. The idea has been around since cars were first made. The problem has always been with the batteries – you need big ones to go far, but the bigger they are, the heavier the car, and so the more batteries you need.

Add to this that batteries take hours to “fill up”, whereas you can can fill the petrol tank in about a minute, and you start to see the issues.

Once you point out that electrical energy is not exactly cheap, and that you are probably not saving the planet unless you get your power from a hydro-electric dam, and you can see why they have not taken off.

So why don’t they just make smaller batteries that charge-up quicker?

Well they are trying. The cell phone industry has driven up the ‘energy density’, but batteries are still rather pathetic compared with petrol. While 60 litres of petrol contains about 2GJ of energy, a pretty good (NiMH) battery of similar weight will muster a paltry 0.02GJ (less than 100th as much). The very highest-tech batteries – still impractical – such as Lithium Thionyl Chloride (LiSOCl2), still contain less than a 10th the energy of simple gasoline.

As a result electric cars cannot go very far on a single charge, and makes them impractical for most road users.

The smart money has not been holding its breath. The next beacon in the night was hydrogen. It packs in three times more energy in per kilogram than petrol. It makes water when it burns. How lovely.

The first problem with hydrogen is the overall efficiency – first you need to make electricity (with some inefficiency losses) – then you need to ‘make’ the hydrogen (with further losses), then you need to compress the hydrogen (yet more losses) and then you need to either burn it or convert it back into electricity in a fuel cell – both of which have more losses still. They all add up. However, these efficiencies are perhaps temporary problems…

A more permanent problem with hydrogen is its low density and thus large volume. Even when compressed to a liquid it still only contains a third the energy of an equivalent tank of petrol. Oh, and because its under very high pressure, the tank needs to be made from thick steel.

This means hydrogen cars also have poor range – and as hydrogen filling stations are rather rare, again this technology is still far from practical for Joe Public.

Due to these problems, the smart money has been looking elsewhere: a compromise solution, that tries to improve efficiency and also reduce emissions but without the short range: the so-called “hybrid”.

The Next Prius - the Toyota Prius is the top selling Hybrid

This is not rocket science. It is basically a car with a fairly normal engine, but also with an electric motor and battery pack.

The logic is that regular internal combustion engines waste energy when the car is running slowly or stopped at the lights. So why not switch over to an electric motor in these situations? And the electric motor runs off batteries which charge from the regular engine when it is running, though in some models the batteries can get a supplementary charge via a power socket at home .

But there is of course something extra that electric (and hybrid) cars can do: they can recover energy during braking – they call it regenerative braking.

The electrical boffins among you will know that a motor, which turns electric current into rotary motion, can work the other way too – turning rotary motion into electric current – when run this way, a motor becomes a generator.

So a car that uses an electric motor to drive the wheels can be used as a motor as you speed up, and a generator as you slow down.

The ability to recover energy from the brakes is where the big savings can be made, especially in town driving, and especially for heavier vehicles. A 2000kg car going at 40 mph has the kinetic energy equal to about 10ml (2 teaspoonfulls) of petrol, and since internal combustion engines are only about 20% efficient, that’s really about 50ml worth – which you burn every time you brake.

And that ‘s why someone came up with regenerative braking.

Aside on electric cars: Electric motors are generally quieter than standard engines. A very real challenge, believe it or not, for electric and hybrid cars, is pedestrian safety. They’re having to test simulated engine noise generators! Strange but true.

Coming soon?

Why not Solar Power?

Many people have suggested that solar panels, aka photovoltaic (PV) cells, may have utility for electric and hybrid cars. Surely it would help to add some panels on the roof and bonnet?

It sounds good, but alas, solar power is fairly dilute – about 1kW per square meter is an estimate used in the industry. And while a few kW may drive your household’s minor appliances, it doesn’t do much for a car. Even small car engines pack over 50kW. There is simply not enough return, even if solar panels were 100% efficient.

When you add the fact that the real “insolation” (power of sunlight) is about 1/10th of the industry claimed 1kW/sqm, and that solar panels are typically only 20% efficient you can see where this is going.

Energy storage

We have already noted that energy storage is key to the challenge. Petrol and diesel pack a punch, but are not renewable and belch carbon dioxide, while batteries would need to be enormous and take ages to recharge.

Nickel Metal Hydride Battery

Hydrogen is not dense enough so you need a colossal reinforced tank if you want to go any distance, and pocket-sized cold fusion reactors are still firmly in the SF domain.

There are however a profusion of ways to store energy, so what other options do we have?

Motorsport fans may have heard about the new F1 regenerative braking systems, called KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), will also know that they are looking at flywheels and capacitors as alternatives to batteries.

A flywheel

The flywheel is simply a spinning disc which stores the kinetic energy in rotational form. This sounds simple, and can be very efficient but requires a fantastically strong flywheel, and will disintegrate if over-charged. Flywheels also have an annoying habit of resisting turns – that is to say their axis of rotation likes to stay pointing the same way, and so would probably need to be mounted within gimbals to allow a car to go around corners…

Flywheels can however achieve pretty good energy densities (comparable to batteries) and are very efficient. They can charge up and down faster and more often than batteries, but are, on the downside, far more expensive.

Ultracapacitors from Maxwell

Capacitors are much cheaper – and can also charge and discharge quickly and many times. The capacitor is the electrical equivalent of a spring. You apply the electric equivalent of pressure (voltage) to the capacitor and it creates an electric field which stores energy. It is fundamentally different to a battery in which an applied voltage supplies electrons which drive reversible chemical reactions; it can charge and discharge much quicker too.

There are many other clever ways to store energy – in springs, elastic bands, compressed gases, raised weights – plenty for inventors to think about, but, alas, too many to cover here.

Despite this profusion, neither batteries or any of the alternatives pack the punch of petrol, so it’s going to figure in our future.

In my next article I ask: what we can do to make the most of our friend, the internal combustion engine? I look at their efficiency and also take a detour of perhaps a ‘green’ way to keep using them: with biofuels.

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